A girl wears a mask calls for more attention on pollution in Beijing, China. (Photo by ChinaFotoPress)

NEW DELHI — As Indians awoke Monday to smoke-filled skies from a weekend of festival fireworks, New Delhi’s worst season for air pollution began — with dire consequences.

A new report from UNICEF says about a third of the 2 billion children in the world who are breathing toxic air live in northern India and neighbouring countries, risking serious health effects including damage to their lungs, brains and other organs. Of that global total, 300 million kids are exposed to pollution levels more than six times higher than standards set by the World Health Organization, including 220 million in South Asia.

For the Indian capital, the alarming numbers are hardly a surprise. New Delhi’s air pollution, among the world’s worst, spikes every winter because of the season’s weak winds and countless garbage fires set alight to help people stay warm.

Even days before the city erupted in annual fireworks celebrations for the Hindu holiday of Diwali, recorded levels of tiny, lung-clogging particulate matter known as PM 2.5 were considered dangerous Friday at well above 300 micrograms per cubic meter. By Monday morning, the city was recording PM 2.5 levels above 900 mcg per cubic meter — more than 90 times higher than the WHO recommendation of no more than 10 mcg per cubic meter.

“My eyes are irritated, I’m coughing and I find it difficult to breathe,” said 18-year-old Delhi student Dharmendra, who uses only one name as is common in India. Because of the pollution, “I don’t go out so much nowadays.”

New Delhi residents were advised to stay indoors on Monday, with health warnings issued for the young, elderly and those with respiratory or heart conditions. Officials said the high pollution levels were made worse by the ongoing burning of spent crops in agricultural fields in the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana.

“Pollution levels every winter gallop, and we are already beginning to see the signs of it,” said Anumita Roy Chowdhury, executive director of the Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi-based research and lobbying organization. Some local studies indicate up to a third of Delhi’s children have impaired lung function and respiratory diseases like asthma, she said. “This really signals health disaster.”

Children face much higher health risks from air pollution than adults. Children breathe twice as quickly, taking in more air in relation to their body weight, while their brains and immune systems are still developing and vulnerable.

“The impact is commensurately shocking,” with 600,000 children younger than 5 across the world dying every year from air pollution-related diseases, UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in the report released Monday. “Millions more suffer from respiratory diseases that diminish their resilience and affect their physical and cognitive development.

Counting 2 billion children breathing unhealthy air — out of a total 2.26 billion world population of children — means the vast majority are being exposed to levels of pollution considered by the WHO to be unsafe.

Out of that 2 billion breathing toxic air, the report puts 620 million of them in South Asia —mostly northern India. Another 520 million children are breathing toxic air in Africa, and 450 million in East Asia, mainly China, according to the report, which combined satellite images of pollution and ground data with demographic patterns to determine which populations fell into the highest risk areas.

Since being identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities in recent years, New Delhi has tried to clean its air. It has barred cargo trucks from city streets, required drivers to buy newer cars that meet higher emissions standards and carried out several weeks of experimental traffic control, limiting the number of cars on the road. But other pollution sources, including construction dust and cooking fires fueled by wood or kerosene, continue unabated.

Last week, the city launched a smartphone application called “Change the Air” inviting residents to send photos and complaints about illegal pollution sources, from the burning of leaves and garbage in public parks to construction crews working without dust control measures.

Men wearing protective masks talk on a street on a heavily polluted day in Beijing, December 25, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon – RTX2011F

On Dec. 18, Jacqui Li glanced up at Beijing’s unusually clear sky. Such beautiful conditions had seemed all but impossible just over a week before, when the Chinese capital endured its first-ever “red alert” pollution warning, issued because heavy smog was expected to smother the city for three days. The alert all but shut the city down: there were stiff traffic restrictions, the suspension of factory operations, closure of public schools and more.

Thumbing through her phone, Li was dismayed to learn that the sunny days were once again coming to an abrupt end. There was news of another red alert, forecast for Dec. 19 to 22. Li was not only upset that the pollution would return—leaving her wheezing—but about how disruptive the alert would be for families like hers.

Li, who lives in the city’s centre and works as an IT consultant across town, said the first red alert was announced on Dec. 7, a Monday, at 6 p.m., meaning the school closures and traffic restrictions took effect at 7 a.m. the next morning. Those stipulations lingered until Dec. 10. Red alerts are issued when the city’s pollutants are forecasted to exceed a level of 200 on the air quality index (AQI) and last for three days or more—even though the smog had all but dissipated by day three of the first alert.

The second red alert was issued on Dec. 18, a Friday, giving parents more time to make arrangements until the restrictions were lifted at midnight on Tuesday, after which the city’s forecasters predicted much of the smog would be whisked away by a cold front. “We’ll know by Monday morning if the weather makes a joke of the forecasting system,” Li said. Indeed, the smog proved to be lower than expected.

The government’s recent red alerts have left many residents feeling more cynical than safe. On Christmas Day, the smog hit an all-time high (485 on the AQI) but no alert was issued. This week air pollution reportedly hit 20 times the recommended safe level (529) and again no red alert. During the last red alert, Zhai Yi Ning was most impacted by the “odds/evens” traffic stipulation, in which half the city’s privately owned cars are barred from the road, based on their licence plate numbers, during the red alert. On the “evens” days she is unable to drive the 20-km commute from her home in Beijing’s outlying Tongzhou district to her office, where she and her colleagues arrange photo shoots for— ironically enough— car expos and dealerships. When she can’t drive, Zhai takes the subway, transfers to a bus, then walks 20 minutes to her office. A 20-minute stroll on Beijing’s most heavily polluted days is enough to leave a bitter, grubby taste in the back of one’s throat. On her walks Zhai said she feels very unhappy, “like there’s no relief.”

Despite the hassles and failures, the red alert system represents a major breakthrough, say environmental and health groups. Dr Bernhard Schwartländer, a representative for the World Health Organization (WHO) in China, told Maclean’s that the issuing of the red alerts “means, first and foremost, that the Beijing authorities are taking air quality, and related health issues, very seriously.” Its efforts have also included massive subsidies and incentives placed on electric cars, and the banning of steel and coal refining in the capital—though Beijing all too frequently becomes shrouded in smog from refineries in neighbouring regions.

On smoggy days, Li said she keeps her daughter indoors, shuts the windows and turns on her air purifier to its maximum setting. Other parents strap masks onto their children before venturing outdoors, while some high-priced international schools have state-of-the-art air purification systems. Li said even the most sophisticated measures ultimately fall short. “Red alerts and forecasts can’t settle this. What’s important is a solution for the future.”

As her daughter sat in her lap, the young mother told Maclean’s, in English: “People don’t just want to receive an alert that keeps them from going to school or work, it’s definitely not enough—” She paused, as her daughter fiddled impatiently with her mother’s hair. Li asked her, in Mandarin: “Do you know what smog is, sweetie? When there’s pollution, do you remember what colour the sky is? Is it still blue?” At that last question, Li’s daughter confidently shook her head in response.

Barry Rosenthal is not an archaeologist. The objects he finds washed up along the oceanfront, however, he sees as a type of current archaeology. “It’s our legacy,” he says. “This is what we’re leaving behind.” It’s hardly glamorous, but part of Rosenthal’s work involves walking along beaches scouring for trash. The project started on New Year’s Day in 2007, when he went out to the Jersey Shore to snap photos of nature—namely, plants. He arrived at a bird sanctuary but, instead, saw what he describes as a desert with pieces of coloured plastic poking out from the sand. So he started to pick up the stuff and bring it back to his studio in Brooklyn.

The Found in Nature photo series started with an assortment of bottle caps that he spilled onto white paper to photograph. Drawn in by how nature made these items look beaten up and aged, Rosenthal started scoping out other marshes and coastal areas nearby. The beach is his flea market, as his website describes it, and Rosenthal has collected needles, toy shovels and enough shoes to organize the left and right feet symmetrically. Like a street-sweeper, he doesn’t pick and choose. Everything is grabbed in bulk and organized later, perhaps by item or colour, though one theme remains constant. “It has [to have] a connection with the ocean,” he says. “It wasn’t that I was going through the dump and collecting trash.”

Spending full days at the beach may sound relaxing, but Rosenthal won’t be found in tourist hot spots where children frolic and adults lie on beach towels. “The places I go to are kind of nasty and, usually, I’m the only person there,” he says. And if he’s ever missing a specific item to photograph, there’s no shortage of coastline to explore. “It’s great to have a free resource but, of course, it’s not great,” he says. “After working on this project for a few years, I started to realize what the ocean must be like, and I just don’t go swimming anymore.”

In the mid 1970s a group of scientists decided to see what happens to a lake when water acidity levels rise. The researchers were fortunate enough to live in a country with one of the world’s highest rates of renewable freshwater per capita. There was enough water, and enough of it far away from human developments, that they they could treat entire lakes as their real-life laboratory.

They picked one such lake and, from 1976 to the early 1980s, poured measured amounts of sulfuric acid into it. The transformation was stunning: “Several key species, including Mysis shrimp, crayfish, and fathead minnows, disappeared entirely from the lake. The lake trout and white sucker populations began to experience reproductive failure.” By 1981 most adult trouts in the lake were so undernourished they looked more like sardines.

In 1984, the scientists began scaling back their dumping activity to allow the acidity levels in the lake to return to their original level. Again, they watched and took notes: “Almost immediately, the lake ecosystem began to respond… The white suckers successfully reproduced and the adult trout were able to feed on the young suckers. The condition of the trout improved markedly… Soon, the trout as well were successfully reproducing.”

The experiment, as many of you surely figured out, took place at the Experimental Lakes research area, in northwestern Ontario. In 2012 the Harper government decided to de-fund this 58-lake facility as part of a series of budget cuts to Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Funding, which Premier Kathleen Wynne announced today will now come from Ontario, amounted to $2 million per year.

Now, here’s another interesting story:

Concerned about water shortages due to persistent dry weather, in 2007 Australians decided to build a desalination plant in Sydney. The $1.9 billion project took years to complete, but while workers were labouring away at it, drought conditions eased. By the time it was finished, there was no need for the facility. The government announced last year it would mothball it — but Australian taxpayers are still paying $15 million a month to cover construction costs.

This latter story is referenced new OECD study on water management. The first building block in devising sound water policies, the report argues, is knowledge: Having a pretty good idea of how human activity affects your water resources is essential to being able to devising the most cost-efficient management policies. Sydney, of course, is an example of what happens when the government doesn’t have a clue. “In Sydney, Australia, for example,” notes the OECD, “analysis shows that if scarcity pricing had been introduced at an appropriate time it could have reduced water demand to a level which no longer required the development of a costly new desalination plant.”

And that’s why axing funding for the Experimental Lakes as a budget-slashing measure makes as much as eliminating preventive care in order to reduce public health costs.

The Harper government’s budget cuts to scientific research at Environment Canada have compromised the department’s capacity to crack down on cancer-linked pollution and its mandate to enforce clean air regulations, say enforcement officers in a collection of internal emails obtained by Postmedia News.

As the government continues consultations with the oil and gas industry on regulations to address rising heat-trapping greenhouse gases, the emails, exchanged between Environment Canada enforcement officers from various regions including Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver, said that the government was eliminating the only Canadian group capable of writing and supervising credible testing methods for new and existing rules to impose limits on pollution from smokestacks.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-quiet-cuts-31/feed/6Lake Winnipeg named as ‘threatened lake of the year’http://www.macleans.ca/general/lake-winnipeg-named-as-threatened-lake-of-the-year/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/lake-winnipeg-named-as-threatened-lake-of-the-year/#respondWed, 06 Feb 2013 13:39:14 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=347117Germany’s Global Nature Fund named Lake Winnipeg as its “threatened lake of the year” for 2013, citing increased agricultural runoff and sewage. The non-profit group said the finding was surprising,…

]]>Germany’s Global Nature Fund named Lake Winnipeg as its “threatened lake of the year” for 2013, citing increased agricultural runoff and sewage. The non-profit group said the finding was surprising, given Manitoba’s sparse population—which is unlike previous “winners” in India, Peru and Colombia. Manitobans, however, won’t be taken aback: pollution on one of Canada’s biggest freshwater lakes, fed by rivers that stretch across the Prairies and into North Dakota, has been a problem for years.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/lake-winnipeg-named-as-threatened-lake-of-the-year/feed/0The greening of the Gulf. No, really.http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-greening-of-the-gulf-no-really/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-greening-of-the-gulf-no-really/#respondFri, 25 Jan 2013 17:00:00 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=341262The UAE is trying to change its image from that of a global polluter

]]>The United Arab Emirates is announcing plans to develop a national strategy for green economic growth, an attempt by the major global polluter to burnish its image.

The UAE is the seventh-largest oil producer in the world and one of the world’s largest natural gas producers, but that energy production has come at a high environmental cost: the UAE has one of the largest ecological footprints of any country in the world. Cars, the main method of transportation in Dubai, a city with few sidewalks or cycling routes, are another major contributor.

A University of North Carolina study estimated that air pollution caused the deaths of 609 people—seven per cent of all UAE fatalities—in 2007, mostly due to infectious particulate matter carried through the air. The problem is even present inside, where indoor pollution—mould, second-hand smoke and other emissions that get trapped indoors—has also become a hazard for the sweltering-hot country. Former Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, head of the Global Green Growth Institute, praised the initiative, adding he hopes it will “demonstrate a compelling case for action from other hydrocarbon-based economies in the Middle East.”

There are two mythic rivers that run through China. One, the Yellow River, takes its name from the colour it naturally takes on as it carries clay from the Szechuan highlands to the sea. The other is the Yangtze, which is not supposed to have an unusual hue—but last week it suddenly flowed through the city of Chongqing a shocking, garish orange-red, a colour you would expect to find on fingernails or a car.

Rivers have turned bright red before in fast-industrializing, pollution-plagued China. A 2008 incident on the Han River, a Yangtze tributary, was blamed on a permanganate spill; the chemical is used in tanning, metal cleaning and bleaching. Last year, an illegal recycling plant dumped red dye from plastic bags and wrappers into the Jian River. The source of the Yangtze’s new hue is not yet established. Algae can create what is known as a “red tide,” but that is a saltwater phenomenon. A deadly earthquake in the upper Yangtze valley did precede the sudden discoloration of the river. Western scientists (and conspiracy theorists) declared themselves skeptical of natural explanations for the lurid colour.

Official Chinese news sites reported that local environmental officials in Chongqing found no evidence of dangerous substances in the water. They ascribed the red colour provisionally to higher-than-normal outflows of iron-rich silt from upstream, and promised that results of their follow-up “would be announced to the public in a timely manner.” But offshore, business and local news websites hinted at a cover-up, noting that pollution is an acknowledged problem along the Yangtze, whose basin contains more than a tenth of the human race. The Yangtze River dolphin, or “baiji,” a freshwater cetacean indigenous to the river, was declared “functionally extinct” in 2006.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/red-alert-for-a-legendary-river/feed/12‘Water’s toxic, wish you were here’http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/waters-toxic-wish-you-were-here/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/waters-toxic-wish-you-were-here/#commentsThu, 09 Aug 2012 18:50:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=279586One man’s whimsical tour of some of the world’s most polluted places -- including in Alberta

It was in India, in 2003, that the idea came to Andrew Blackwell. He was invited to visit Kanpur, an industrial city of three million that finds no place in any popular guidebook. But it had received—from its own government—the title of India’s Most Polluted City, a designation that required, as Blackwell notes in an interview, overcoming “some fierce competition.” What he found there was an environmental movement “that feels more like a civil rights struggle, where activists focused on their kids’ everyday experiences and economic future, rather than the moral stance for pristine nature we take in the West.” And Blackwell realized too, as he watched Hindu pilgrims immersing themselves in the Ganges river in that city and “collecting holy, chromium-laced water, all without another tourist in sight,” that the world must be littered with “unvisited but fascinating places.”

Nine years later, the 40-year-old American journalist has been to more than a few of those places, and describes his experiences in Visit Sunny Chernobyl. His seven destinations rangefrom that Ukrainian city, which a 1986 nuclear catastrophe rendered the iconic site of human environmental overreach, to the computer-recycling hot spot of Guiyu, China, where he tried (and failed) to keep up with a cigarette-smoking, eight-year-old motherboard stripper. Most uncomfortably for Canadians, who will wince at seeing a hunk of Alberta included in what one reviewer of Sunny Chernobyl casually summed up as seven global “toxic spots,” Blackwell also went to Fort McMurray. (The other sites are Delhi, India; Port Arthur, Texas; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; and Amazonia.)

Blackwell has lived in the U.S. since he was two, but he was born in Calgary, the son of a Canadian mother and an American father. He headed to Alberta partly as a homecoming, and partly, he adds amiably, because “Americans don’t expect this kind of environmental destruction in Canada.” But mostly he went because he can’t think of a better locus for what he calls the “paradox” of our lives, the one shared by everyone who both benefits from industrial civilization and cares about the environment. If there wasn’t a collective worldwide lust for what Syncrude and Suncor provide, Fort McMurray wouldn’t have carbon emissions twice the size of Los Angeles’s, a city 100 times larger.

Blackwell is sympathetic to how acutely that paradox vibrates in the Canadian psyche. The “CO2-belching petroleum giant” to the north is also a place where 1,600 dead ducks became a national scandal demanding the prime minister’s attention: Canada seems torn between “pioneering the era of dirty oil and leading the fight to stop it.”

Not that awareness of his own stake in fossil-fuel-fired abundance stopped Blackwell, in a book peppered with wry asides, from having a great deal of outraged fun with the oil industry and its friendly provincial government. Indeed, since he found it as easy as shooting ducks trapped in a tailings pond, he could hardly help himself. The provincially operated Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Blackwell writes, “represents some of the best industrial propaganda in the world,” adding, “which I mean as a compliment: you try writing the brochure for Mordor.”

His sympathy for the locals is far more overt elsewhere. Fort McMurray, for the most part, provides high-paying jobs, which are noticeable by their absence at the other end of the proposed oil pipeline from Alberta. Downtown Port Arthur, riddled with deserted buildings, is home to an industry that doesn’t sustain it and to community activists who can’t decide if the smell of its sulphurous air means money or death. Most, as troubled by poverty as by health outcomes, would settle for both.

It was the stories of such people, as much as the weird, off-kilter beauty he sometimes found—the peaceful, depopulated countryside around Chernobyl sounds lovely—that power Blackwell’s book. Environmentalism will fail, he says, if human needs are ignored and it focuses solely on an idealized beauty. “The world is already past that point. We have to learn to see civilization as part of the natural world.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/waters-toxic-wish-you-were-here/feed/1The Commons: Peter Kent invites you to celebrate his workhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-commons-peter-kent-invites-you-to-celebrate-his-work/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-commons-peter-kent-invites-you-to-celebrate-his-work/#commentsMon, 04 Jun 2012 21:31:58 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=263815"This is a great occasion for Canadians to celebrate what this government is doing"

By Mr. Mulcair’s telling, the Environment Minister had just last week conceded the need for better environmental monitoring. But today, the leader of the opposition, reported, there was news that the government had decided to eliminate a unit dedicated to the study of smoke stack pollution. “What is the plan to replace Environment Canada’s smoke stack pollution team?” Mr. Mulcair asked of no one in particular. “The plan is to outsource its work to that great environmental country, the United States.”

He slowly pumped his fist to the beat as he delivered the question. “Could the Conservatives tell us how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to monitor smokestack pollution at a Canadian coal-fired power plant?”

It was Jason Kenney’s turn to play prime minister today and so the Immigration Minister stood to chop his hand and offer assurances. “We will take no lessons from the NDP on this,” he scolded. “If that member chooses to distrust the EPA or President Obama, that is his choice.”

Mr. Mulcair was unimpressed. “Mr. Speaker, usually countries try to take care of their own environment,” he shot back. “They do not outsource it.”

David Christopherson deemed this worthy of a hearty desk-thumping.

“The Conservatives claim that the cuts will not affect monitoring but they are already being contradicted by our own environment department,” Mr. Mulcair continued. “Environment Canada’s website confirms the work done by the smokestack pollution team includes enforcement and compliance. Clearly the minister who just spoke does not even know what programs are being cut.”

The NDP leader then managed to pump both fists as he chided the government side about volcanoes.

“Through the Clean Air Act, through the restriction on toxins, through the increased enforcement of our environmental laws, through higher fuel standards, through the reduction in carbon emissions as a result of our plan to reduce carbon emissions across the country, through all of these measures this government,” Mr. Kenney now boasted, “objectively speaking, has made more progress on the quality of our environment and the air that we breathe than any government in the history of the dominion.”

In the wake of so unimpeachable and authoritative a report, Peter Kent was soon thereafter moved to deliver something of an acceptance speech. “This is Environment Week,” the Environment Minister reported, officially in response to a question from Megan Leslie. “This is a great occasion for Canadians to celebrate what this government is doing for the environment, for cleaner air, for cleaner water, for regulation of chemicals, for mitigation and adaptation to climate change, Parks Canada, and for a responsible resource development.”

Either distrustful of President Obama or unwilling to accept Mr. Kenney’s truth, Ms. Leslie seemed unimpressed. “Mr. Speaker, the minister’s explanations are bizarre because he defends climate science to the Prime Minister, but then he happily axes the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy and he presses delete on the Kyoto accord,” she mused. “He extols the virtues of science, but he fires scientists, he guts environmental assessments and he stops emissions reporting. Why will the minister not actually put his money where his mouth is, do the responsible thing, do the common sense thing, and allow proper review of the environmental protection changes in the budget bill?”

Mr. Kent did not take kindly to the opposition critic’s attempt to spoil his celebration. “Mr. Speaker, I can only characterize the content of my colleague’s question as sanctimonious twaddle,” he lamented. “Our government is protecting the environment at the same time as it protects Canadian jobs and the economy. A responsible resource development is the hallmark of the budget which we are in the course of passing, a budget which is receiving more hours of debate than any budget in recent times. This government is getting it done.”

With Ms. Leslie out of turns, it was Bob Rae who offered the rejoinder. “Mr. Speaker,” he quipped, “I suppose that would count as sanctimonious claptrap.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-commons-peter-kent-invites-you-to-celebrate-his-work/feed/12The quiet cutshttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-quiet-cuts-15/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-quiet-cuts-15/#commentsTue, 29 May 2012 16:05:04 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=261925The RCMP will close forensic labs in Halifax, Winnipeg and Regina. The consulate in Buffalo will be closed. The British Columbia government is unhappy with the planned closure of a…

Late last week, the government sent parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page a letter refusing to release details of budget cuts. Page said the letter, which his office will publish online today, cites privacy provisions in union contracts to say details cannot be released until long after the budget has been voted on.

Page said those same unions have told him they have no problem with details of cuts being released as long as individuals are not named. Page is now working on a public response letter. “My view is that parliamentarians absolutely need this information sooner rather than later,” Page said Monday in an interview with The Chronicle Herald. “It’s just not right for public servants or even the government to say ‘We can’t give it to you.’”

Mr. Page reports that if include planned cuts from 2010 to the present, the Harper government is reducing spending by $10.8 billion and eliminating 26,800 jobs.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-quiet-cuts-15/feed/9Out of the redhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/out-of-the-red/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/out-of-the-red/#respondThu, 28 Oct 2010 13:40:18 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=153700If a Canadian researcher has his way, the red mud that caused disaster last week could turn very useful indeed

The Danube River is famously blue, but after a recent toxic waste spill in Hungary, parts of it were flooded with a sickly red slurry. On Oct. 4, a reservoir wall had collapsed at an alumina plant near the village of Kolontar, releasing over 750 million litres of red mud—a byproduct of turning bauxite to alumina, which is needed for aluminum production. The disaster forced hundreds from their homes and left nine dead. The red mud was waist-deep in some places, locals reported; one witness said it smelled like blood.

A chemical soup of heavy metals and minerals (including iron oxide, hence its colour), red mud is highly corrosive; workers in Hungary measured the pH level and found that, in some places, it was as caustic as bleach. It can even be slightly radioactive. (Rio Tinto Alcan’s alumina processing plant in Quebec is the only one in Canada; it has withstood flooding and an earthquake without incident, a spokesman noted, adding that it’s “highly unlikely” such a spill could occur here.) We end up creating 63 million tonnes of red mud each year worldwide, but we still don’t know what to do with it: red mud is typically stored in reservoirs, dried out and buried, but it’s so chemically stable it won’t really break down. Marcel Schlaf, a chemistry professor at the University of Guelph, has a better idea. Red mud, he believes, could help transform bio oil derived from plant waste into fuel.

Bio oil is produced by pyrolysis, when biomass (organic waste, grass clippings, etc.) is rapidly heated in the absence of oxygen. Fossil fuels are created as “biomass is transformed over millions of years, deep in the Earth under high pressure,” says Franco Berruti, director of the University of Western Ontario’s Institute for Chemicals and Fuels from Alternative Resources. In the lab, “we do it in seconds. But we are not as good as nature.” Unlike fossil fuels, bio oil contains water and oxygen; it’s very acidic and hard to ignite, and if it’s overheated, it can solidify. What’s more, “it’s black, it’s viscous and it smells really bad, like concentrated barbecue sauce,” Berruti says.

About two years ago, Schlaf was teaching an undergraduate class about red mud, he says, when “a light went off.” He looked harder at the mud’s composition, and realized it might contain the right mix of metals to catalyze chemical reactions and upgrade bio oil, which he acquired from Berruti’s lab. (His findings were published in the journal Energy & Fuels earlier this year.) “The acidity of bio oil neutralizes the alkalinity of red mud,” he says, and “turns the bio oil into something usable.” It might turn red mud into something usable, too. After its transformation, “it’s no longer red; it’s grey and magnetic,” he says, and could be used to make anything from ceramics to cement.

Schlaf cautions that we won’t be running our cars on red-mud-treated bio oil any time soon; the research is in its early days. (He’s working with Murray Thomson, an engineer at the University of Toronto, to see how the upgraded oil works as a fuel.) Still, it’s an exciting idea, especially given our dwindling supply of fossil fuels. “The beautiful thing is that you’ve taken mining waste on one side, [agricultural waste] on the other,” and created a fuel, he says. With vats of red sludge just waiting to become landfill, it sounds almost too good to be true.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/out-of-the-red/feed/0A road that cleans the airhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/life/a-road-that-cleans-the-air/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/a-road-that-cleans-the-air/#respondThu, 19 Aug 2010 17:20:15 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=142634New material may soon become a valuable tool in the fight against pollution

Take crushed limestone, add some gravel, throw in a bit of cement and you’ve got the basic recipe for concrete. Then add a white coating of titanium dioxide and you’ve got a powerful air scrubber that’s now helping to clean air in cities across the globe.

Titanium dioxide is a naturally occurring photocatalytic chemical that reacts with sunlight to remove nitrogen oxides—car exhaust pollutants that cause smog and acid rain—from the atmosphere by turning them into nitrates that can be washed away by rain. Tests show that when added to concrete it removes anywhere from 35 to 60 per cent of those chemicals from surrounding air, and, because titanium dioxide also breaks down dirt, it makes concrete self-cleaning.

“[It] could be a very feasible solution for inner-city areas where they have a problem with air pollution,” Jos Brouwers, a researcher studying photocatalytic concrete at the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, told CNN. “You can apply it very easily in normal production. It doesn’t require any maintenance; it doesn’t wear off with normal use.”

His team paved a city road in the eastern Netherlands with bricks coated with the chemical, and monitored it for two years. Although the project was originally met with skepticism, the results spoke for themselves: the pollution around the test road was reduced by almost half.

The new development isn’t a panacea. It costs about 50 per cent more than regular concrete, and the nitrates it produces accelerate algae growth in nearby bodies of water, which can be harmful to aquatic life. Brouwers says this isn’t a problem. “If you look at the total pavement costs, where the stone is one part—there is also labour, foundations, etc., to calculate—then you are only looking at a slightly higher cost,” he says. And some experts say the amount of nitrates produced is relatively small and far less harmful than the pollutants the concrete sequesters.

The new material may soon become a valuable tool in the fight against pollution. It’s already been installed in the U.S., France and Italy. Now, Brouwer says, more governments “need to be convinced it is a feasible technology.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/a-road-that-cleans-the-air/feed/0Canada’s sickest lakehttp://www.macleans.ca/society/life/canadas-sickest-lake/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/canadas-sickest-lake/#commentsThu, 20 Aug 2009 20:40:24 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=75670Living, toxic goo is killing lakes the world over. It may be too late for Lake Winnipeg.

]]>Cisco! Walleye! Whitefish! From the foredeck of the MV Namao, a scientific research vessel on Lake Winnipeg, student-scientists in rubber boots and banana-yellow hard hats are calling out the catch. They’ve also landed troutperch and emerald shiners, whose weight, stomach contents, skin tissues and isotopic concentrations will help gauge the health of the huge prairie lake. The trawl net—which looks like a bright blue tube sock with a nine-metre hole—was hauled aboard by a yellow crane just before the skies went suddenly dark, unleashing a heavy wall of rain like only the prairies can. Walloped by wind and rain, even the Namao—at 34 m, the biggest ship on the lake—is rocking and rolling on Lake Winnipeg’s dangerous, ocean-sized waves.

Perfect storm conditions are also brewing below the surface. Ironically, the isolated prairie lake, ringed by pristine Boreal forest, tucked far away from industry and major population centres, has become the sickest big lake in the country. What was once a small patch of algae, first noted in the 1990s, now grows to smother more than half of the massive 24,500-sq.-km lake most summers. In 2006, the pea soup blanket covered almost the entire lake, home to 10,000 cottagers, a $100-million tourism and recreation industry, and a $25-million commercial fishery. It’s “like sailing through a sea of green paint,” says Namao head biologist Alex Salki, one of a handful of concerned local lake scientists who founded the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium. The putrid green mat, twice the size of P.E.I. and clearly visible from space, is jaw-dropping evidence of an ecosystem in deep trouble. Already, Lake Winnipeg, the world’s tenth-biggest lake, is in worse shape than notorious Lake Erie, says David Schindler, one of the world’s top water authorities, based at the University of Alberta.

Lake Winnipeg is “just the tip of the iceberg,” says UBC water expert Hans Schreir. Globally, the problem—known as “eutrophication”—is the “No. 1” water quality issue we face, says Salki. The culprit isn’t oil spills, toxic waste or even pesticides, but nutrient overloading from fertilizers, human and animal waste. Nitrogen and phosphorus do precisely in water what they do on land: cause plant life to run wild and multiply like crazy. The process is accelerated by the channelization of waterways to allow rapid runoff from farmer’s fields, and the destruction of wetlands and riverbank areas. Wetlands, “nature’s kidneys,” which act as natural filters and nutrient traps, have been reduced by 70 per cent in Canada. In the Red River Valley, which contributes 66 per cent of Lake Winnipeg’s phosphorus load, wetlands have seen a hundredfold reduction. Manitoba’s so-called “hog boom,” meanwhile, has seen the number of hogs on the watershed swell to 8.2 million, dumping an annual excrement load equivalent to at least 30 million humans. Alberta, the western limit of the lake’s catchment area, has another eight million head of hogs and cattle.

Globally, toxic algal blooms—in both lakes and coastal systems—have been increasing in number, frequency and size. A toxic bloom in the Yellow Sea at Qingdao nearly halted the sailing events at last summer’s Beijing Olympics. A year earlier, a rank toxic bloom choked legendary Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, leaving more than two million people without drinking water and killing fish. Meanwhile, a 7,770-sq.-km oxygen-starved “dead zone” has spread in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi—chock full of fertilizers after draining the U.S. Midwest—spills into the ocean, causing an explosion of toxic algae and bacteria, killing fish and threatening the Gulf’s $2.8-billion fishery. Scientists say such zones are spreading, and could one day make up one-fifth of the world’s oceans.

Already, the problem is very common in western Canadian lakes: at least one-quarter of those studied by University of Regina biologist Peter Leavitt are showing early warning signs. Some, like Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle lakes, Alberta’s Lac La Biche, and Ontario’s Lake Simcoe, are showing “serious signs of eutrophication,” says Schindler. In 2007, 122 Quebec lakes sprouted massive algal blooms, and last summer an algal bloom sprouted on the St. Lawrence River, killing fish, birds and mammals. Even Lake Erie, back from the biological brink, has begun sprouting algal blooms and low-oxygen dead zones all over again.

But aesthetics aside, are the scums, smells, toxins and cyanobacteria all that bad for the country’s lakes? Strangely, Lake Winnipeg’s pickerel fishery, which recently surpassed Lake Erie’s total catch, has never been better. (Generally, the equation goes: the more algae, the more bugs, the more bugs, the more fish.) In Bangladesh, where 80 per cent of animal protein in the diet comes from fish, some lakes are being purposefully eutrophied to increase fish counts. But there is a tipping point, when all that new life begins to choke the lake, says University of Winnipeg aquatic ecologist Eva Pip. When all that organic material dies, it sinks to the bottom, where bacteria go on an eating binge, using up all the available oxygen. At that point the system “collapses,” she says. Anaerobic bacteria, which do not need oxygen, take over; the water will stink, and the masses of blue-green algae floating on top will cut off all sunlight to whatever is below. “The lake,” says Pip, then “becomes an algal swamp.” And once it tips over the edge, it is “extremely difficult” to return a lake to a healthy state.

Still, there have been successes, notably in Switzerland, which has kept its lakes largely free of algae by reducing agricultural runoff by 50 per cent over the past decade. And then there’s Lake Erie, whose comeback is one of the world’s great environmental success stories. It was declared “dead” in the 1960s, but within a decade the five major cities on the lake’s south shore managed to slash phosphorus loading by half, largely by updating wastewater treatment plants, which almost instantly reduced cyanobacterial blooms.

Getting Lake Winnipeg off death’s doorstep will require similar-scale reductions to the nutrient load. Even Winnipeg’s $1.8-billion wastewater treatment upgrade will only reduce it by two to three per cent. The city is responsible for only six per cent of the load. The rest flows into the lake from diffuse, “non-point sources,” including drainage ditches from farmer’s fields, stormwater from Regina, phosphorus from dishwashers in Fort Frances and yard fertilizers in Calgary. More than half originates in the U.S., notes Schindler.

In six months, the first peer-reviewed science (collected by the Namao) will be published, painting a more complete picture of the crisis. Perhaps more importantly, it will provide policymakers with the scientific backbone to move forward. Already, the government of Manitoba, where 11 per cent of the workforce is involved in agricultural production, has tabled tough draft legislation limiting fertilizer use—in places, right down to zero. The province is also calling for restrictions on hog operations in some regions, despite the protests of enraged farmers.

Some, like Pip, believe it may be too late—that Lake Winnipeg has already passed the point of no return—but others are more optimistic. “We believe we’re in time,” says Bill Barlow, former mayor of Gimli, the saucer-flat Icelandic fishing community of 5,000 on the lake’s south shore. “But just in time. This is one of the world’s great lakes. We can’t let it go down on our watch.”

]]>A few anxious moments, this morning – my first in Beijing. Bolt awake at 5 am, I went to the window, looked out and saw a giant panda. Now, since I arrived in daylight yesterday, and looked out the same window several times, you’d think I might have noticed an anthropomorphized bear, two-storeys high (a relic of the 1990 Asian Games) but jet lag will do that sort of thing to you.

So far, some pleasant surprises actually. After all the pollution hype the sky was even sort of blue, yesterday, or as blue as a summer’s day in Toronto. (Although today has dawned with the smelly, soupy haze we’ve all heard so much about. Visibility is probably about a kilometre and the sun looks like a flashlight behind a grimy bed sheet.) The less flavourful aspects of the weather, although hot and humid—33 C, 86 % humidity— are so far not as unspeakable as I had been led to believe. And for the always whiny hordes of international media, there is little to complain about. The path through the sparkling new airport was smooth. The Olympic bus system seems relatively efficient. The Media Villages downright posh compared to Athens and Turin. Although the extra bright florescent lighting in the bar is sure to prove problematic.

The Chinese government has spent $40 billion of venues and infrastructure (more than 4 times what the Greeks spent) and it shows. The “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium and Water Cube Aquatic Centre, which glow red and blue respectively at night, are landmarks. Every boulevard, corner and overpass seems to have freshly planted trees and flowers. And along with the 100,000 police and 300,000 security cameras there is an omnipresent, and far less intimidating, army of volunteers. Most of them seem to be university students, eager to try out their English and helpful to a fault. And there are way, way too may of them. Yesterday, one escorted me the 50 feet to my media bus at the airport. Two helped me carry my one and only piece of luggage to my room. A momentary looked of confusion or thoughtful pause anyway around the village or Olympic venues, immediately attracts a gaggle. My colleague Ken MacQueen and I, have already started to compile a list of their most absurd tasks (fodder for a future post.) The leader so far? The nice young lady in the cafeteria tasked with handing us an empty tray.

Still finding my sea legs, but I’ve already got one priceless Olympic memory—a squad of young army guys marching single file through our media village this morning, unarmed except for a single lucky soldier shouldering a broom and dust pan.